Gag rule

Gag rule, in U.S. history, any of a series of congressional resolutions that tabled, without discussion, petitions regarding slavery; passed by the House of Representatives between 1836 and 1840 and repealed in 1844. Abolition petitions, signed by more than 2,000,000 persons, had inundated Congress after the establishment of the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833). Gag rules, supported by proslavery congressmen, postponed the consideration, printing, and referral of such petitions. Repeal was secured by a House group led by the former president John Quincy Adams and Joshua R. Giddings.

...of Florida, no new state should be admitted into the Union with slavery; and that neither slavery nor the slave trade should exist in the District of Columbia after July 4, 1845. The “gag rules,” a resolution passed by Southern members of Congress against all discussion of slavery in the House of Representatives, effectively blocked any discussion of Adams’s proposed...